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Corrective White Balance

And wrapping up our chapter on understanding light it's important that we get to touch again on white balance. Now we have two slides here because I feel like there's two approaches to white balance there's the corrective side were basically correcting white balance issues that we have in differing color temperatures, then there's also the creative side when we change the color of a flash or change the color of our light because they want to get a stylistic our creative use out of it so let's cover the more corrective side first. Now those of you that I watched photography wanna one you'll recognize this little diagram. This is our color temperature diagram showing kind of some of the basic light temperatures of different indoor lights versus outdoor lights. So we have match flame candlelight, which is roughly just under two thousand degrees. Kelvin, we have, like, say, household, tungsten and halogen lights like the lights behind us, which are roughly twenty, five hundred degrees upto...

. Three thousand agrees and things like flash flashes fifty, five hundred degrees led l, c e, c r t these air all around fifty, five hundred degrees kelvin going straight below there we have average noon outdoor sunlight. This is also fifty, five hundred reese coming, but depending on times of day, the sunlight is also gonna change in color so during sunrise and sunset, we're really far closer to this type of light in the background that orange light than we are this kind of neutral white fifty five hundred. Kelvin look, we're at two thousand three thousand degrees kelvin at night time, let's say during blue skies twilight that nighttime color temperature is generally around seventy, five hundred ten thousand degrees kelvin okay, so whenever we're shooting in these different situations, if you find that the light that you're adding to the scene, the light that you're adding with flash doesn't quite match the light naturally in the scene, this is where we want to add corrective white balancing this, we want to change the light here, and we could do that in a couple different ways. Let me show you two simple ways I'm gonna show you an inexpensive way and then, well, our favorite way so the most inexpensive way, which we still do to this day as well, and we have our people on our staff, we don't want to buy magma's for everybody because they're a little more expensive, so I kind of by myself. So the simple way to do it is to buy gel sheets, this is a job. They generally come in sheets that are quite large. They're probably like two by three feet and so forth. And they can cut into, like say, you could make about fifteen or twenty of these from one sheet of gel, which is only ten bucks, fifteen bucks or so from either your local camera store or we just get it from being aged online because it's free shipping, free tax and so forth. Free tax, no tax, whatever. But all we do is we apply a little velcro strip on both sides of this. We apply a bit of velcro to the flash and then simply, we just take this over the flash. Not the most elegant solution, but this totally works. So this is a very simple and inexpensive way to jail all your flashes. Velcro is very cheap. Majel sheets themselves are very cheap and it's awful. But if you want a more elegant solution, my favorite solution for really, we're going to use it for not only just jelling, but also for grids and for light modifications. So forth is the magma, and what you do is you just attach this little rubber strip right over the flash head, and it has magnets on both sides of this. And the magma's system which is eighty bucks comes with gels it comes with various color gels the jail holder it also kind of grids and so forth and then you just basically attach this and attach is b of magnets and so now you have a jelled flash so essentially what we've done here is we've just changed the color temperature of this flash too cto that's the flashlight are that's the jail that I have on here is a color temperature orange cto we'll talk about jails and a little more as we go forward but if there was one color gel that I would say you must have in your tool kit it is a ceo gel it's because it's the most universal you can use it during sunrise during sunset to kind of neutralize you can use it beyond to create creative effects which will show you you can use it indoors as well but let's show you what it's done in this particular scene. So here we have the scene where I'm shooting jill it's sun it's basically right where the sun is setting around the horizon we're getting a really beautiful light super orange and every minute as it sets closer and closer, the horizon is getting more and more orange ok, so what I notice is as I take my first shot I have my white balance of fifty, six hundred degrees kelvin the sunlight. It looks just a little bit too orange. But my flash looks right about right. The flash that's over the shadow area to scan. I haven't blocked out the light, basically. So we have a bit of sunlight on her cheek and then around the areas of shadow, you can see where the flash is. The flash looks decent. It looks okay. The color temperature is fine, but the sunlight is too orange. If I drop my color temperature in camera, I dropped the white balance to forty, six hundred degrees kelvin. Then the sunlight looks pretty decent. It looks muchmore neutralized, much less orange basically. But the flash it ends up looking blue because it's at fifty, five hundred greece calvin so my option is I simply out of jail to my flash? And then what we've done is we basically added a scrim. So we use one scrim to block off the light coming from the sun and all that does that scream is just a transparent or not transparent but semi transparent white piece of fabric, just just a five and one westcott scrim and we just hold it there to shear off the direct sunlight so no more direct sunlight on her, then we used another reflector. So just another west con five in one and I have my jelled flash I balance into that five one and onto her and we get this beautiful balance look, this is a thirty, eight hundred degrees kelvin again the sun is setting pretty quickly so you can see that the sun has gotten even a little bit more orange because over here where fifty, six hundred k and it's much more neutral over here with thirty, eight hundred still quite warm. So the sun is getting more orange as it sets, but look at how beautifully it's balanced look at how she's kind of a nice natural warm tone and it's the same as the background. It looks like we just use a natural sunlight for this shot, but in reality it is jailed flash that gets us that look so that's how we do it of course you can use by the way a reflector stand generally where we shoot on the beach stands don't hold up well when you put reflectors and next to him because they're like giant sales and the wind will knock him over. So I just have my assistants hold them up. Well, let's talk about the five primary tips when it comes to using corrective white balance ten number one I want you all to gel to match the dominant light and here's the thing if I'm shooting a scene like this where the background life thes air probably like close to twenty, six hundred twenty hundred degrees kelvin, they're very, very orange lights I'm not going to gel so that those lights look quite I don't want those lights toe look white, I just wanted to be less orange so I might gel this to a standard cto, which would be like thirty, six hundred degrees kelvin the background is still warm I'm not going to try and get it to the neutral because it would end up looking very bland and very boring and I don't want my light toe look like pure white I wanted to still have some of the ambiance and have that emotion to it, but what I do want is I want to gel to the primary light so my primary light in a room is that light all papa cto on rather than using a blue flash had just bearable or like bear flash if, for example I go into a wedding reception and there's still a lot of daylight coming through the windows. So maybe I have chandeliers that are closer to that color temperature has the lights in the background, but the dominant light in the room is still daylight because it's still bright outside I would leave my flash unveiled I want to gel to the dominant life if I don't winds of happenings we're mixing light and mixed light over a subject does not look good if part of their faces covered in yellow light part of their faces covered in blue light it's not gonna look okay so ten number to the most commonly needed gel like I mentioned is a cto jail okay so that's the one jail we can use it for corrective lighting purposes we can use it for creative white balance purposes we can use it for tons of things now they make blue jails and green gels and gels for every type of situation that's great toe have those but the one jail that would recommend having is this ceo standard full cdo they make cto is by the way color temperature orange gels in full cto half cto quarter cto and so forth but let's just get a full cdo jealousy and you should be good if you want to play around with blues and greens and so forth and by all means go for number three remember that whenever you gel whenever you apply a filter over your flash if you'll notice if you look through this it actually is darkening the screen a little bit well it's doing the same thing your flash jelling is going to reduce your flash power by a bit okay so any time you add a jail you're gonna need to power up a little bit because you're losing a bit of flash power number four is to make sure this is one of the things that kind of people are jelling there flashes and just kind of learning is probably the most notorious mistake is they don't gel the entire flash. And for example, if you cut this too thin and you cover part of the head and there's part of the head that's open, well, you're getting fifty five hundred kelvin now this little strip right here on each side and you're getting thirty, six hundred out of this and you're ending up mixing light, so just remember that you want to cover the entire head of the flash though don't be stingy. These things are like ten bucks. Why aren't you going to cut him large enough cash? Just cover the heads, people getting okay. Last gels can be stacked to further alter color. If, for instance, I'm in a scene where one cto doesn't get me to that corrective white balance that I need well, I can add another half cto quarter cto or another full cto over that gel to della, but remember again, if we're adding more jails were cutting flash power all right, so that's it for corrective white balance let's move to the next video where we talk about creative white balance, which is really my favorite way to use gels